Supporting Grassroots Media with VoiceBox

Audrey Watters

One of the reasons I like Drupal is its strong developer community. And sure, you can say that about a lot of open source. But some of the projects undertaken by Drupal I find real affinity with -- not just technologically, but politically as well (if that makes sense).

VoiceBox was built as part of the Knight Drupal Initiative and funded by the Knight Foundation.

VoiceBox is designed to be a tool for grassroots and community media. As users on a VoiceBox/Drupal site create content, they generate their own blog. Out-of-the-box, VoiceBox offers customizable user profiles, content creation (text, videos, photos), content aggregation (via RSS), as well as discussion.

VoiceBox allows the creation of a Drupal site that is geared towards community participation, offering not just the tools to create content, but to curate content as well -- and arguably, the latter is becoming increasingly important.

The educational applications are numerous -- school newspapers, local writing projects -- which shouldn't be a surprise since VoiceBox was developed by the good folks at FunnyMonkey.